1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for recognizing a face, and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for recognizing a face using a component-based linear discriminant analysis (LDA) face descriptor.
2. Description of the Related Art
Face recognition has mainly been performed using a principal component analysis (PCA) or an independent component analysis (ICA). Also, face recognition using a face descriptor was introduced by M. Abdel-Mottaleb, J. H. Connell, R. M. Bolle, and R. Chellappa [“Face descriptor syntax, Merging proposals”, p181, p551, and p650, ISO/MPEG m5207, Melbourne, 1999].
However, it is difficult to extract facial characteristics from a query image and search for facial images having the same facial identification and similarities, using facial image database containing information regarding changes in pose and illumination. In particular, conventional face recognition algorithms require a plurality of sheets containing query images and therefore do not successfully detect desired facial images using only one sheet or a few sheets containing query images.
Face descriptors suggested in MPEG-7 enable the restoration of a facial image having the same identification as the original facial image using a query image as soon and effectively as the aforementioned prior art can. However, when using these face descriptors, there is a limit to restoring facial images having the same identification with respect to a set of images showing great changes in pose and illumination, using these face descriptors.
Meanwhile, conventional two-dimensional approaches were made to eliminate changes in an image due to a variation in illumination by removing image components positioned in a subspace which is spanned by a predetermined vector. However, identification information included in these projections is likely to be lost during image processing, and thus, it is difficult to conduct precise face recognition.